Rockville Centre letters

Mercy provided exceptional care

To the Editor:

I want to offer thanks to Mercy Medical Center for the exceptional care provided to my patient during the delivery of her triplet boys on Jan. 5.

Mercy Medical Center has been in a transition phase for several years. The tremendous improvements in the delivery of quality care have simply soared.

Ms. C.F. was delivered at just short of 35 weeks of gestation. The enormity of such a tremendous undertaking required the coordination of many clinical services in the Labor and Delivery Unit. While the Neonatal ICU is capable of caring for babies down to 23-plus weeks, the crossing of such services has not been done in recent years.

The services of obstetrical care, neonatology care, neonatal ICU care and anesthesia, with backup availability of critical care intensivists, not only made the birth of these three beautiful children safe, but gave it the appearance of having been performed with ease.

The tremendous cooperation across all services was maintained by staff leadership of each service.

I can express the wonderful feelings of thanks and gratitude only by heartfully praising every single person who touched the lives of the parents and those little boys on the day of their delivery, and in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit thereafter.

Kudos to Mercy!

Laurence F. Mack, M.D.

North Massapequa

Dems can't claim fiscal responsibility

To the Editor:

Given the current weak economic conditions referred to in the editorial "Legislative raises: talk about tone-deaf" (Jan. 28-Feb. 3), with so many Long Islanders struggling, I agree that it was an inappropriate time for Peter Schmitt and the Nassau County GOP to consider addressing legislative compensation issues. I am heartened that Schmitt has listened to the people and rescinded the pay raise.

On Long Island, we have segments of our society experiencing hyper-unemployment. It has been alleged that as many as 35 percent of the trade unions on Long Island are unemployed, with many African-American communities experiencing unemployment rates as high as 40 percent.

What I find so reprehensible is the attempt by county Democrats to now adopt the mantle of fiscal responsibility as a result of this pay-raise dustup. On News 12’s "LI Talks" last week, Minority Leader Diane Yatauro had the audacity to accuse Schmitt and the Republican majority of giving themselves pay raises while Nassau County faces $400 million in deficits.

The public needs to realize that the Suozzi administration steered the CSEA to a 25 percent arbitration award that didn't become effective until 2010-11 and now runs for several concurrent years, representing the single largest component of the county’s current deficit. It was Yatauro and the former Democratic majority who approved this compensation despite being aware of the deteriorating economic conditions that could no longer financially support the arbitration award as the economy slipped into a deep recession.

In 2007, when Yatauro was the presiding officer, the Democrats in the county Legislature, including our own legislator, Joseph Scannell, approved pay raises of more than 60 percent for the county executive, comptroller, tax assessor and clerk — all in excess of $65,000 each.

The public should also realize that since 1996, when the Legislature was formed, lawmakers had not received any increase. While it has been reported that increasing the presiding officer's salary to $99,500 represented a 47 percent pay raise, that is misleading. The raise equates to an annual 2.65 percent increase for the 14 years in which the presiding officer failed to receive any pay raise.

The city manager of Long Beach earns $158,000 to manage a $75 million budget! How can you provide pay raises to all of the other important executive positions in county government and exclude the presiding officer, which is a full-time position and oversees a $2.7 billion budget?

Michael P. Mulhall

Rockville Centre

Fix it now

To the Editor:

The 2,000-pound gorilla in the room is our health care system. Without a comprehensive, honest and effective fix, any short-term help for Main Street and jobs will not last because that gorilla will pound such programs into the dirt. It is amazing to me that just about every economic think tank, conservative or progressive, agrees, yet there are citizens and elected leaders who, for their own narrow and even selfish reasons, want no change and are willing to mislead other Americans into believing this change is the wrong thing to do. All indications say otherwise.

Fixing our terrible economy, which nearly collapsed a year ago, is Job One, and it must be fixed on different fronts at the same time. President Obama did not make this mess, President Bush did. There, I just said what everyone is tiptoeing around. Obama stopped the free-fall and because of the lack of time, not perfectly, but it worked.

The different fronts that are being worked on are health care and then reforms and controls on banks, Wall Street and investment houses. This is a tall order, and only a single year has passed in what will take more years to fix. Health care is a good thing to do first, because it will remove the main stumbling block to overall economic reform and will help just about all of us. It will also make us more able to compete in the world economy.

Those who stand in the way of this without any better ideas, while making all sorts of wild claims to scare people and make sure it will fail, are working to the detriment of our country. Those who are proud of themselves for their destructive efforts are the ones who are truly unpatriotic.

The health system as it currently stands can't work much longer. It will cause large economic problems and a great deal of Americans will lose health coverage. Here is what the changes in health care will do for us:

We have the most expensive health system of any industrialized country; 18 percent of this country's total output goes toward health care, and that's going up every year. Yet 45 million Americans don't have health coverage, and the rest of us pay more and more for what we get every year. We pay more for drugs as well, and what coverage we do get is less comprehensive every year. That is a type of tax that is forced on us.

By adopting comprehensive national reform, we can lower that 18 percent to at least 12 percent, which, by itself, could pay for the cost of these reforms. Insurance companies will no longer have the power to reject you when you're ill or because of pre-existing conditions. There won't be rationing of care, as the insurance companies now do. The drug "doughnut hole" for Medicare recipients will be gone. Medicare will work better, guaranteeing that it will always be there for us without any cuts in benefits.

A public option is key. All that means is that our government will have its own plan that is on par with those of other insurance companies that you would pay for. It would pay for itself. Because it won't be for-profit and answerable to shareholders but rather answerable to all of us, it will cost less and be another choice for all of us. That kind of competition will force the insurance companies to become more cost-effective to compete with it.

Don't be fooled by those whose only interest is to keep things as they are. As American living in the richest country in the world, we deserve a system that is the best, and we don't have that. So we must fix this thing now. Insist on change, and don't let anyone tell you everything is OK, because it's not! The system as it stands will create an economic disaster.

Arnold Kirschner

Oceanside